Page 22 of I Have Faults Enough

They arrived on the bank, both coughing up river water, and far too spent for speech. Meanwhile, the storm continued raging above them though its terror had begun, at last, to ease toward something less than fury.

"Are you?" he managed, when breath permitted it. “Are you well?”

"I,” she took in a breath, “am,” another breath, “alive,” a third breathed again.

Her hair was long, and extended over her face, and down her sides, soaking wet with bits and pieces of dirt, mud, and whatever else fed the river. Darcy’s hair looked the same; water dripping down his forehead, his face looking absolutely spent, but he lived and so did she.

After five minutes, he let out a deep exhale; it sounded exhausted, and he coughed a bit. After another fit of hard breathing, he hauled himself up onto one elbow to look at her properly. She could hardly see him in the darkness, but ever so slightly saw the grey of his face.

Rain and river water alike continued streaming down his face, and he said with hardly any strength, "We are free of them, I think."

She shook her head, too tired and shocked to say anything to the man who had just saved her from what felt like impending doom.

Darcy inched closer to Elizabeth, who was still lying on the muddy bank. When he was much closer, he reached for her hand in the dark, and she let him take it, and for a long moment neither of them said anything further.

They were, in that moment, two creatures cast up by the river's mercy, half-drowned, disordered, and wholly ignorant of the ground beneath them. And yet it could not be denied that the peril that had held them fast these three days together was, for this hour at least, past. Whether they were in truth delivered from all danger, or had merely exchanged one adversary for another, the cold and the unfriendly dark, neither of them could yet say.

CHAPTER 14

She did not know how long they remained on the bank before Darcy said, "Elizabeth, we cannot lie here.” His words echoed what she had been thinking before she said them herself. Elizabeth could tell that his voice had gone thick and slow with a cold that had claimed him no less thoroughly than it had claimed her. "Wet through, in this wind, we will take a worse harm from the cold, if we do not find some shelter directly."

It took her a moment, in the confusion of cold and exhaustion, to realize what he had called her. He had not addressed her as Miss Bennet or Miss Elizabeth, as had been his like. He had called her Elizabeth; it was entirely improper, and so unlike Mr. Darcy’s refined ways.

Elizabeth knew she ought to remark upon it, or at least resent it, but the thought arrived and dissolved almost in the same instant; she was far too tired to correct him, and told herself thus.

Instead, she replied directly to his suggestion. "I do not think I can walk far." Her teeth were chattering, and she felt herself growing more cold from her wet clothes and the frozen ground around them.

"Nor do I," he said frankly, revealing how spent he was, "but we cannot stop moving, not yet. Not while we are still wet and the wind still has us. Come, let us start moving before we freeze."

He got himself up first, unsteady, one hand braced against a fallen tree's tangled roots, and reached the other down to her. She took it and let him haul her up, and for a moment they only swayed together in the wind's last, weakening gusts, neither quite certain their legs would hold, before they attempted to move through the muck at their feet.

Fortunately, the storm had begun to lighten, and the rain thinned from its violent torrents to a miserable sheen. The lightning also began to fall away to a distance, and Elizabeth saw only intermittent flickers somewhere behind them, toward whatever country they had left their captors and the river both to fight over.

They moved slowly, from the cold and weight of their soaked clothing. And yet, not a quarter of an hour into their walk, Darcy spotted, along the bank a little further down, a darker shape that seemed to look like an old sort of fishing shelter.

As they moved closer, Elizabeth saw that its roof was mostly intact, and its outer walls looked like rough planks that had gone silver with age. It looks sound enough, she judged, to keep out at least the worst of the wind.

They reached it by a route that took them a good deal longer than the short distance warranted, as her ankle was unwilling to bear weight. Although, she also noticed that his own steps carried a stiffness about the ribs; though, he bore it without complaint.

It was only once they had gained the shelter's dubious cover, and sunk down together onto a floor of old, dry leaves blown in through some gap in the boarding, that they both felt the growing cold and exhaustion seep deep into their bones. They had not sat down a minute, before Darcy noticed her fingers and body clattering in a way that alarmed him.

"Your hands," Darcy said, looking at her through the darkness, and reaching for her hands. Once he found them, he turned them palm-up in the grey light. "You are shaking."

"I am," she said, and found the sentence difficult to say, feeling all the pangs of cold and fear rush through her. "I cannot stop it.” She was, in truth, chilled to the bone, and perhaps a little shocked at the river they had just survived. And yet, she added, her teeth clacking from her shivers, "You are shaking too."

He swore under his breath; it was the first ungoverned word she had ever heard him use, and then he began, without asking leave, to chafe her hands hard between his own, and then her arms, working some rough warmth back into her by main force.

His own hands were shaking rather worse than hers by the time he was done, though he said nothing of it and did not stop until some dull prickling sensation returned to her fingers; she winced at it, which he seemed to take, oddly, as good news.

"You may hurt," he explained, "but I am glad of it; it means you are coming back," he said, feeling some relief, as she seemed to be shaking much less than before.

Elizabeth looked at him through the haze of darkness, feeling all the cold and exhaustion in her being. She could see that he was still pale; his hair wet against his forehead, his breathing still uneven from the effort of the river. Yet, his attention remained fixed entirely upon her.

She did not reply at once. He did not release her hands, and she did not draw. For a moment they simply remained there staring at the other, his thumbs moving almost unconsciously across her knuckles as though the motion had become necessary to him, until he seemed to realize what he was doing and loosened his hold.

“How badly are you hurt?” Elizabeth asked, feeling a little strength return to her.

“Well enough,” Darcy said matter-of-factly, while feigning off a shiver.